"This book was inspired by my students. In the past year, I have received research papers whose bibliographies included such sources as a golfing manual, a thriller set in the Vatican, and Leadership Lessons from the Dog Whisper (sic). I have tried to convince my budding scholars that popular books are not to be relied on as sources of Truth, as they are far from infallible. There is no requirement that a book be fact-checked or peer-reviewed; with the advent of easy self-publishing, it doesn’t even need to be spell-checked. One fateful day, I exclaimed to my class that I could throw together a book of my own made-up facts, and put it up for sale on Amazon tomorrow. Would you use that as a source for your paper? I asked. The glazed look that I got in response gave me an idea. I decided to step aside and let the rock roll back down the hill. Behold the Big Book of Baloney, the world's first combination notebook, sketchpad, and academic source: It's the only [Citation] you'll ever need."

I know, we shouldn't care more about their education than they do. That's easier said than done. Some of us still care.

So tell me:

Q: To what lengths have you gone to make a point? Costumes? Accents? Explosions? Faking your own death after a particularly bad student presentation?

[+]

Mod note on linked book: Although it appears to be a real book, we've read that it's only about 100 words long! We'd advise thinking seriously before spending 99¢ for it.

13 comments:

The day I handed back a research paper, I spent the whole class pulling up web sources that students had cited and mocking them. Many were children's sites, one was a white supremacist site, and one was a heavily-biased Christian site the student had used for a paper on an Islamic topic. Despite all of the instruction on what constitutes a reliable source, where to access reliable sources, and how to evaluate sources for credibility, the lazy fuckers just fucking Googled some key words and clicked on whatever came up first. Fuck.

I stopped short of saying what is often in my head: "I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and crap a better paper than this!"

I require my students use the library database (recently updated to have a search bar that searches EVERYTHING our library system can access: books, journals, films, what-have-you. I spend an entire session showing them how to use it--how to apply filters to get to a manageable number (this comes after the class period we spend on getting from a broad topic down to a narrow, manageable one). I require a 15-source annotated bibliography (but have stopped requiring books) and I limit how many sources can come from a Google search.

I still get papers with all Google sources. Those papers often flunk because the directions for the essay clearly state that no more than 2 sources can come from Google, and the rest must be from the library (databases). It's worth 20% of the total essay grade just to have the right type of sources, and they still fucking bag it.

And I have similar experiences with source requirements. Things aren't quite as bad in a junior-level writing-in-the-disciplines course (some of the worst offenders have either shaped up or flunked out -- er, taken a hiatus), but I still get a few students a semester who simply ignore my very clear guidelines regarding sources (and all the handouts, in-class exercises, readings, etc., etc. designed to ensure that they understand the vocabulary in which said guidelines are expressed).

I gave up proving points long ago (if I ever tried it). I just grade the work and hand it back, allowing rewrites/redos if I'm feeling charitable (and it isn't the day before final grades are due, which is often when the most completely-off-the-mark shows up, for the first time). I do feel like the exchanges in which a student hands me something that bears no resemblance to what I asked for, and is surprised when I give it a failing grade, are getting more frequent, but it's also possible that I'm just getting old.

Accents. Scottish accents work very well ("Ooch, this is g-r-r-r-r-r-reat stuff!"). French, not so much, because here in Canuckistan if you use a French accent, with some Monty Python stuff as inspiration in the back of your mind, they think you're an anglophone bigot. Actually Scottish and English accents are about the only ones that work. Anything else and you're treading on thin ice...

Once I had a meltdown where I kicked everyone out who was not able to demonstrate that they were ready for the in-class sharing assignment that we had been preparing for all week. I thought maybe one or two would be kicked out. Turned out that instead, only three out of 20 were prepared... So it ended up being way more kicking out than I had originally anticipated and blew way out of proportion. I have never yelled at a class since then and will likely never do so again. Now I just shrug and say, "you're welcome to leave with your F," and if they leave, fine; if not, no biggie. They end up sitting in class doing nothing while those who are prepared work.

After some pretty bad papers in an upper level course we had a little discussion about the differenct between "good enough" and "half-assed." We all decided that they were about the same so if the students thought their papers were good enough...

I like the story in the OP. There's something to be said for seeding the internet with nonsensical pseudosources for typical college classes; it could be very educational.

For intro classes, whenever I go over a test in class I include the number of the homework problem each question was copied from. That hasn't made me any friends, but at least it guarantees the comment "tests are fair" . Once I computed a correlation table "current homework ave." vs. "grade on test" and used it to compute some instructive conditional probabilities, like Pr (A,B or C on test given F on HW). That made an impression.

This post reminded me of physicist Alan Sokal's "demonstration" perpetrated against the journal Social Text (and "post-modernism" in general) sometime in the 1980s. Parts of theoretical physics have become so wildly speculative, I wonder how hard it would be for someone to do something analogous (publish erudite-sounding gibberish) to Physical Review Letters (or maybe a less influential journal.)

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.